*NEW RELEASE SPECIAL* Review of Meet Me in the Strange by Leander Watts

I took one look at this amazing cover and fell in love with it, so immediately requested the book.

Davi tries to help a new friend, Anna Z, escape a cruel and controlling brother, and the teens end up running away to follow the tour of their rock idol, the otherworldly Django Conn. The story is set in a weird and wonderful retro-futuristic city of glam-girls and glister-boys and a strange phenomenon that Anna Z calls the “Alien Drift.”

This is a really intriguing read. Firstly, I am clearly not the target audience. While I enjoy my music and at times lock onto new artists and play an album to a standstill – I no longer have the intense, self-defining relationship with music that I recall needing during my teenage years. This book is targeted at those youngsters and those not so young, whose relationship with their music is mind-altering and profound.

Davi, the protagonist, is deliberately left ungendered, but is clearly male – although that doesn’t matter as much as you might think in this futuristic world where gender fluidity clearly prevails. The language is a delight – Watts uses a form of slang of his own devising, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I get a tad tired of sci fi authors using sayings that originated from our nautical past with the assumption they would still prevail in an era where we are no longer in an environment where the sea matters, so I thoroughly enjoyed the way Watts plays with language.

The same imagination and inventiveness is bestowed upon the world building and details of Davi’s everyday life as the son of a hotel owner whose relationship with his children is fleeting. Davi and his older sister live an odd, unstructured life with far too many resources, far too much time and scarily little interaction with anyone they can turn to for guidance or advice – other than a few kindly members of staff who do their best to look out for the teenagers. By contrast, the actual storyline suffers. It seems that so much imaginative energy has been expended on the world building and cool characterisation depicted through the inventive language that the actual plot is rather simple.

However, I’m not sure the target audience will really mind. What this book offers is a glimpse into the daily life of an imagined teenager in the future, including his love of music and his attempt to help Anna get free from her brother. Indeed, since I completed this book it keeps popping back into my head – the world and the feel of it, right down to the musty splendour of the hotel, which has seen better days. Recommended for readers who also enjoy music as well as inventive and futuristic world building. While I obtained an arc of Meet Me in the Strange from the publisher, the opinions I have expressed are unbiased and my own.

I think it mostly is really important at a particular time in our lives – often when we are beginning to work out who we are. And the music which we are drawn to helps us to define our own identity, especially nowadays.